Doctors at UMC Utrecht, Erasmus MC and UMC Groningen have performed the first DCD heart donation procedures in the Netherlands. The stopped heart of a deceased donor is placed outside the body in a machine where it starts beating again after being supplied with oxygen and blood. The heart is then transplanted.
Heart donation was previously only possible with a brain-dead donor. However, more than half of the number of deceased donors (150 out of 250 donors in 2020) involved donation after circulatory arrest (DCD, Donation after Circulatory Death). In these DCD donors, until recently, all organs – except the heart – could be transplanted. A national shortage of donor hearts prompted the UMCs to introduce this technique in the Netherlands in cooperation with the Dutch Transplant Foundation (NTS) and the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport (VWS).
There are around 120 heart patients on the waiting list for a donor heart each year. Mortality on the waiting list is high. One in seven dies because a donor heart is not available in time.
Cardio-thoracic surgeon Niels van der Kaaij, UMC Utrecht: ‘The 3 UMCs have calculated that DCD heart donation nationwide could eventually result in about forty additional heart donors per year. A doubling of the number of heart transplants currently being done. And that is desperately needed, because due to the huge shortage of donor hearts, people on the waiting list die every year.’
The DCD (heart-in-a-box) heart donation procedure has already been implemented in a few countries worldwide (including Australia, USA, Belgium, UK and Spain). Recently, the National Health Service (UK) came out with a report that six children between the ages of 12 and 16 had been saved thanks to DCD heart donation.
The procedure was made possible in the Netherlands thanks to a grant from the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport and cooperation between three UMCs; UMC Utrecht, UMC Groningen and Erasmus MC. The NTS regulated the frameworks within which the project could be rolled out nationally. The NTS is designated by law as an organ center and works with hospitals and transplant centers on organ and tissue donation and transplantation, commissioned by VWS.
